Author: Hannah Wind
Location: Germany Date: Friday, 23 August 2024
Source: Nina Simone in Carnegie Hall (1964) (Retrieved from Steinway & Sons)
SUMMARY
Nina Simone (1933-2003) was an African American singer, pianist, and civil rights activist. Participating in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960 alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, Nina Simone used her voice and musical talent to convey a message of frustration about racial injustice in the United States. A song that still impresses many nowadays is “Mississippi Goddam,” which not only reflects her own story and experience regarding racial injustice but also serves as an archival record to educate people nowadays about the happenings back then.
BACKGROUND
“The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam - And I mean every word of it.” – These are the famous opening lines of Nina Simone’s (1933-2003) performance of the song ‘Mississippi Goddam’ in Carnegie Hall, New York City, in 1964. Written in a fury about the killing of four Black girls in a 1963 bombing motivated by white supremacist violence in Birmingham, Alabama, Simone, who was African American herself, wrote what she later said to be her “first civil rights song.”
Historical Background
For around 100 years, the so-called Jim Crow laws mandated and legalized racial segregation and disenfranchisement. On this legal basis, people of African American descent were marginalized in nearly all public sectors, including education, voting, and the job market. The Civil Rights Movement (CRM) of the 1950s and 1960s worked towards overthrowing all Jim Crow laws.
Alongside famous activists like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., Nina Simone actively participated in the movement against white supremacy. She not only partook in the famous marches from Selma to Montgomery but also instrumentalized her voice and vocal performances to advocate for and support the CRM.
‘Mississippi Goddam’ as a Personal Account of Racial Injustice
Born and raised in North Carolina in the 1930s, Eunice Waymon, professionally known as Nina Simone, faced the struggles of growing up as a Black person in a system coined by white supremacy early on. However, it was not until the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia rejected her that Simone, whose talent for music was discovered in her childhood, had to reinvent herself. In the documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?”, she asserted, “I knew I was good enough, but they turned me down. And it took me about six months to realize it was because I was Black. I never really got over that jolt of racism at the time.”
This, in conjunction with her fury about multiple happenings in the South of the USA that led to the killing of several Black people, inspired her to write her first protest song ‘Mississippi Goddam.’ While the song owes its title to the assassination of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, Simone also addresses very particular events illustrating the racism and injustice Black people faced in other states, for instance, the problems of desegregation in Tennessee. She also directly references slavery by pointing out that Black people were “washing the windows” or “picking the cotton.”
Through sarcasm and provocation, Simone draws attention to the only slowly changing justice system in America and the worry that the biased criminal justice system could give rise to and exacerbate racial injustices. She calls for action and demands faster system change, expressing her frustration about many CRM advocates’ nonviolent approach.
It is for these reasons that her song ‘Mississippi Goddam’ serves as an expression of distress about the brutality and injustice committed against Black communities in the segregated South of the United States of America (USA) in general. Simultaneously, Simone criticizes the ‘laziness’ of the fight against racism, thereby anticipating a more radical fight against injustice. Simone later said that this song “broke her voice” and that she could let herself be heard about what she had been feeling all the time, creating a new narrative for us to make sense of the events of that time.
What Can ‘Mississippi Goddam’ Teach Us Today?
‘Mississippi Goddam’ proffers a new narrative regarding the CRM, thereby shaping and influencing our understanding of it. But why are such ‘archival records’ – selective official “memories, documents, [and] practices of knowledge” – essential regarding law and justice nowadays?
Simone was inspired by historical events and time periods, such as slavery and Alabama, to write the song and wanted to mobilize change by specifically pointing out requests like “Just give me my equality” and the abovementioned call-and-response chorus with her band. Her artistic framework, therefore, encompasses the past and the future, capturing personal feelings of distress and desperation regarding the violence against Black people and the ignorance of it by white people at the time. Hence, deciding that this is worth an archival record, Simone, through archivalization – “the conscious or unconscious choice (determined by cultural and cultural factors) to consider something worth archiving” – gives us an insight into the Black-white dynamics of the 1950s and 1960s and the Black people’s struggle for justice.
Overall, evaluated from the present, we need this officious archival record to create and maintain justice, as justice needs memory and proof of memory to be preserved. ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ depicting the racial struggle on a big scale but also including Simone’s personal experience, clearly qualifies as (proof of) memory and, therefore, contributes to the creation and understanding of racial justice nowadays.
REFERENCES
Feldstein, R. ‘“I Don’t Trust You Anymore”: Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960s’ (2005) (pp. 1349-1379) 91(4) The Journal of American History.
Fields, L. ‘The story behind Nina Simone’s protest song, “Mississippi Goddam”’ (2021, January 14) Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/the-story-behind-nina-simones-protest-song-mississippi-goddam/16651/
Garbus, L. ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ (2015, June 26) Netflix [Movie].
Ketelaar, E. ‘Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives’ (2001) (pp. 131-141) 1 Archival Science.
Simone, N. ‘Mississippi Goddam’ (1964). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teqWnF-HD1M
Steinway & Sons, ‘Nina Simone’ (2024) [Photo]. https://www.steinway.com/artists/nina-simone
Van Alphen, E. ‘The Politics of Exclusion or Reanimating the Archive’ (2015) (pp. 118-137) The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 49–50.
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